Inks: Generally, inking this page without any additional effects would be perfectly acceptable, but Greg encouraged me to build on it with whatever extra inking tricks I could come up with. In the first panel, I added some fingerprint smudges where the smoke begins to trail in. Kreeg was inked with my old fave, the Raphael #1 8404 for the whispier lines, then, as the brushstrokes began to dry out, I'd bear down for a rough, uneven effect for a shaggy fur look. This is called "drybrushing". I like to mix the clean lines with the shaggy lines for animals. Where Greg shaded with the side of his pencil, I darkened with a china marker (grease pencil). I dipped a sponge in ink for more billowing smoke. Then I began my personal decent into Hell by puttering with different effects for far too long. I shaped up the smoke with black splatter effects. Then came the white splats to re-enforce the cinder-popping illusion. I was unhappy with the smoke shape and returned to black splats. Then more white splats again. I spent almost three days getting it just right. On a monthly comic you don't that kind of time on every page, so you make up the time with another page that's lighter in detail.

      Colors: On special pages, Greg would get very involved with directing the color. This was one of them. For hours, he and Caesar chipped away at every panel, bringing the page one step closer to visual "reality", with brilliant results. Caesar, following our black and white visual cues, added more flames and lightsources. It's probably the single most impressive synthesis of pencils/inks/colors I've been involved with. It was all very time-consuming, as most labors of love are.